Lemmings is a name that may not be some commonly recognisable with some of today's younger gamers won't remember which is sort of a shame but when the only thing that series has come out with is a crappy mobile game that no one plays, it's sort of to be expected. Well the lads over at NoClip have us covered with Zombie Night Terror, a game that has clearly taken a lot of inspiration from Lemmings but added it's own post apocolyptic twist.
In most zombie games you play as survivors trying to fend off the hordes of the undead but Zombie Night Terror flips that around and instead puts you in charge of a horde of zombies that you must command through various levels and tasks the player in most cases with infecting a certain number of people or getting the zombies from point A to point B so the outbreak can continue. There's more to it than just that but in a nutshell that makes up most of what you'll be doing.
If you're not sure why I mentioned Lemmings at the top of this post it's because gameplay wise it's basically the same thing. For those that haven't seen Lemmings I'll take a moment to explain. You don't actually control the zombie horde directly, instead they are dropped in in to the stage and in most cases will just aimlessly walk from left to right with no regard for anything that might stop them or kill them. Your job is to direct them around the map with little arrows on staircases, for example, or mutate them into diffent zombie forms to help them avoid or get through an obstacle. For example you may be faced with a situation where your zombies will mindlessly walk themselves off a cliff so you must mutate the first zombie in the line into an overlord, which will turn the zombies around and prevent them falling to their doom. Aside from mutations you get a number of skills which a zombie can perform such a run to get past falling objects or close the gap on their prey or a jump to well.....jump.
What makes the game interesting is that you can combine the mutations and skills to come up with pretty clever solutions for various puzzles. For example the basic one is to turn a zombie into a direction altering overlord and then using the jump skill on it which will permenantly change the overlord into a sort of catapult so you can lob zombies into hard to reach places. Another example is using the tank mutation with the scream skill. Scream on a regular zombie will make it scream either scaring nearby humans or waking up zombies that aren't currently part of your horde, mainly used for paralyzing guys with guns so you can bite them. If you use the tank mutation to turn a regular zombie into a big strong lad though, scream will send targets in front of the tank flying away from it allowing you to cross gaps or send smaller lads towards their targets much faster.
The regular levels are pretty fun to work out and get through but there's a number of stages where the game starts to get cute with it's design and I don't mean that in a good way. One bad example of this is an auto scrolling platforming stage where you have to use mutations and skills to get away from a vehicle that kills your zombies on touch. At the start it's fine but you end up losing a great deal of guys and ending up in an unwinnable position because you got fucked by some trap you had no idea was coming and had way too little time to react to. That's only a mild annoyance in comparison to the dark levels. Long stages in pitch black where the only way to see is one radioactive zombie and the rest are just 2 blinking eyes in the darkness. Somewhat maze like and full of pitfalls you can't see until you've already thrown a few zombies down there they are hair-pullinglly annoying and whoever decided to include these in the game deserves a slap hard enough to maybe cause a tooth to go flying.
Thankfully though, those levels are few and far between and overall Zombie Night Terror is a fun little puzzle game that will leave you feeling pretty satisfied when you eventually solve a level. So if you're a puzzle game fan looking to scratch an itch then maybe check this one out and if you're an old school Lemmings fan looking for a similar kind of game then absolutely check this one out.
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